Toward a more diverse high-tech workforce

(IDG) -- The Rev. Jesse Jackson last Monday
announced plans to invest $100,000 in
Silicon Valley companies. At the same time,
he chided Valley businesses for their lack of
racial diversity, arguing that too few blacks
and Latinos are employed in the area's
high-tech industry.

Jackson said these companies are not
meeting the affirmative-action requirements
that their federal contracts demand. To
encourage firms to hire a more diverse
work-force, he announced that his Wall
Street Project would be investing in the 50
largest publicly traded Silicon Valley
companies, which include Sun Microsystems,
Cisco and Intel. With that stake, he wants
to participate in a kind of "shareholder
activism" to ensure more racially balanced
staffing.

"An argument can be made that this current
economic boom is a result of public and
federal investment," says Mark Lloyd,
executive director of the Civil Rights Forum
in Washington, D.C. "It ought to be a matter
of fairness that these companies reach out
and do what they can do to ensure that
American workers are trained and employed
in 21st century jobs."

In the nascent Internet industry, in which
hiring is often done on the basis of
qualifications such as "creative thinking" and
"problem-solving aptitude," recruiters are
looking for intangible skills that could belong
to almost anyone. So what is the tech
sector doing to expand its recruitment
efforts into more sectors of U.S. society?

Hardly anyone wants to say. Of almost a
dozen companies contacted, such as Yahoo,
Ascend and Netscape, none would directly
comment on their affirmative-action policies,
although a few alluded to diversity training
and compliance with
equal-employment-opportunity programs.

The tech sector is generally credited with a
mindset more embracing of diversity than
the rest of corporate America. But
increasingly, the industry appears to be
falling prey to another of Jackson's
criticisms: That companies are more willing
to hire a worker trained abroad, who's willing
to stay on the job in exchange for a green
card, than they are to recruit domestically.

According to a report from the Department
of Commerce's Office of Technology Policy,
95,000 new systems analysts, computer
programmers and software engineers will be
needed each year. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics recently reported that only 175 of
1,434 Silicon Valley high-tech companies
working on federal contracts reported
statistical information about the racial
makeup of their workforces, as required by
law. In those 175 companies, 35 percent of
the 172,000 employees are minorities -- a low
percentage for California's heterogeneous
population.

To find the right talent in the fast-growing Internet Economy,
companies need to get creative, argues B. Keith Fulton, directory of
technology programs and policy for the National Urban League. "There
are tremendous gaps in the technology workforce -- one in 10 jobs go
unfilled," he says. "These companies don't have time to be racist."